Luke Plunkett

Game Maker is a useful tool for indie developers, allowing them to craft simple games made from 2D sprites. Over the weekend, it got a whole lot less useful, as the program's digital rights management system went haywire, branding many people's artwork with a giant skull and crossbones.

That's normally the punishment for when the system determines the copy being used is a pirated copy, but the problem is that on the weekend it started stamping the image on plenty of copies that weren't pirated.

In response to disgruntled members of the community, especially those directly affected, creators YoYo Games have removed the "feature" from the service, and informed all affected that they can recover their artwork and assets by completely deleting Game Maker, right down to the registry entries.